Electricity, let it rain all over me

I’m just reading Ray Robinson’s breathtaking debut novel Electricity (ISBN 0330444506) about Lily O’Connor – a young woman with epilepsy and a troubled past who’s trying to track down her lost brother.

Robinson wrote the novel as part of his PhD in creative writing and spent a considerable amount of time reading scientific literature on epilepsy and interviewing people with the condition.

Although the book doesn’t attempt to explain the science behind it, it does brilliantly capture the idiosyncratic experience of epilepsy in the sometimes wonderfully poetic language from the book’s protagonist – an otherwise plain speaking northern girl.

the room cracks and shatters, the colours wrapping their arms around me but I can’t hold them back, it’s like rain running down windows, the air’s melting in front of me, colours like feelings inside, suffocating but nice
like storm clouds up there
like bullies, black lightning off and on in their fat bellies and I need to pull at everything, need to touch and tug and twist and poke and push because it’s all slipping away from me
and I know
– Mel?
I know she’s here in my room, but I can’t let go of the chair, my fingers crack-cracking the corners and I

can’t catch my
can’t catch my

Link to review from The Guardian.Link to review by The Independent.Link to information on the novel from Lancaster University.